"Syriana" director and screenwriter Stephan Gaghan says he felt the tragedy of 9/11 deeply. Fighting fear, he traveled the next month. He has followed America's reaction along the way.
"It felt like this car America was accelerating, like someone hit the gas and shifted into low gear," he says. "Maybe the headlights are off, but we're careening down some hill in the dark and I'm holding on in the backseat going, 'Where are we going?'"
Gaghan says the creative process always starts emotionally for him, and soon he was writing "Syriana," which hits theaters tomorrow. Gaghan's previous credits include the screenplay for "Traffic," an Academy Award-winning film that exposed America's drug underworld.
"Syriana" may never have gotten off the ground if it were not for actor George Clooney, who took a pay cut to play CIA operative Bob Barnes, one of the ensemble piece's main stars. Clooney later injured himself during the filming of a torture scene. He tore the wrapping around his spine and suffered a cranial spinal fluid leak. Still, the actor says this was a movie he knew he had to make.
"I'm constantly searching for and looking to do things that inspire me," Clooney says. It's not about the money or creating an image, he says. "I'm interested in doing projects that raise questions and debate."
Gaghan says with "Syriana" he didn't have an axe to grind; he just wanted to write about the oil industry. In his research, Gaghan says he interviewed hundreds of people.
"Quite often what I actually saw and what people actually said just wouldn't work [for the movie]," Gaghan says. "I witnessed things and heard conversations that were great scenes, but if I stuck them in the movie people wouldn't believe it ... or they would say 'Oh, you have an agenda.'"
"It's always eye-opening to see how many people are mad at us," Clooney says. However, he adds that the idea in both "Syriana" and his last film, "Good Night and Good Luck," was not to be political. "The argument is to raise debate, not say what the answers are, because clearly we don't have the answers."
It's also not an anti-President Bush movie. Rather, the film "is going after 50 or 60 years of flawed policies in the Middle East," Clooney says.
The film covers a lot of ground. Gaghan says his script included over 200 locations spread over four continents with five different languages. In order to manage this, "Syriana" splits its narrative into four main subplots.
"When you're looking at a system it's really important to fragment the main protagonist," Gaghan says. For "every extra protagonist you get, you can take people into a different facet of something in a more realistic way."
Clooney says it's important that Americans see the other side's perspective. "If you're going to have a war against an idea, which is terror, then you have to understand the elements," he says. "You have to understand what makes them do evil things."
Whether Hollywood will make more films like "Syriana" in the future comes down to money, Clooney says. Still, he's confident films of this type will do well.
"Hollywood's sort of had a tougher time of it lately because they haven't done very challenging films," Clooney says. "My thought is that if you make some challenging films, maybe people will show up"
